Our next port is 3,000 nautical miles away, which seems like too long (to me at least). It should take about 25-30 days to reach French Polynesia, and I expect that eventually we will get into a routine. We hope to leave next week, once our friend Oliver has arrived and we finish all the projects on our lists. Getting ready to cross an ocean takes a lot of preparation.
We have a list of projects to prepare the boat. A few of these are inspecting and tensioning the rig, setting up and testing the sea anchor, and making new fair leads for the jib sheets. We will also hire a diver to clean the bottom of the boat before we leave.
In the beginning, we may get pretty sea sick, so my mom will prepare a few meals just before we leave. This way she, she doesn’t need to go down below and cook if she is feeling sea sick.
Another aspect of the preparation, is planning. We have been watching the weather every day to see when we can leave. There is a calm spot with little to no wind in the Pacific. This calm spot is called the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (I.T.C.Z.). We are watching the I.T.C.Z. to see when it will be the smallest. The other thing that we are planning is the paper work. We need papers to leave Mexico and to arrive in French Polynesia.
The aspect of preparation that I am most exited for is provisioning and supplying. We will stock up on food (from mangoes to garbanzo beans) and water. We will also get diesel for our engine, and propane for our stove. We have started (and will continue) buying a few miscellaneous things that won’t be available in the Marquesas and Tuamotus, like clothes, clothes pins, and Nerf balls to stuff in our hawse pipes around our anchor chain to keep water out.
The last aspect of preparing (that I am going to talk about) is preparing the crew. I’m kind of scared about being at sea for about a month. The thing that helped me the most, was looking at the digital charts, and seeing how short 3,000 miles looked on the computer screen. Before that, I had been trying to ignore the fact that we are about to cross. Preparing the crew also means taking our last real showers for a long time.
Although I know what the preparations are like, I don’t know what the actual passage will be like. Maybe 3,000 miles won’t seem too long after all.
Hear are a few more recent photos:
